Though it begins in the (in)discipline of visual studies, my intervention is interdisciplinary and takes into account largely ignored ecological considerations in MENA-region analyses of empire. The ongoing and misleadingly named “garbage crisis” in Lebanon, once again re-ignited since 2015, precipitated my engagement in the necro-and-geopolitics, materiality, and visuality of waste. This paper is a preliminary exercise to rethink the politics of waste through a close reading of The Blue Barrel Grove (2013–), an ongoing investigative research and artistic practice by the Beirut-based writer and artist Jessika Khazrik. Texts, exhibition installations, interactive performances, a poem, and a play revolve around an illegal toxic waste shipment that left Italy and ended up in Lebanon in 1987 during the civil war (1975–90). Khazrik works with the extensive photographic and scientific archive of Pierre Malychef, an eco-toxicologist and herbal pharmacologist assigned by the Lebanese state in 1988 to investigate the case, closed seven years later with his indictment as a “false witness.” I argue that her work, with and beyond the archive, unfolds in two registers. On the one hand, she imagines with matter and its “intra-action,” in Karen Barad’s terms, pursuing waste as it exiles beings and spaces. On the other hand, she reveals the workings of language in the judiciary proceedings that charged the scientist with false testimony, questioning what ends up counting as “evidence” and “witnessing” in the linguistically-embedded economy of exile and denial. Through The Blue Barrel Grove then, Khazrik participates in a feminist intellectual movement that disavows questions of representation to refocus on matter. The result is an artistic practice that proposes a new way of thinking about waste by literally returning to it, enacting a historical cut to its modern exile in the region in the context of a colonial discourse on hygiene. What ensues is an unruly imaginary where waste and the land collaborate against what I call “real-estate governmentality.” Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfways: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hanssen, Jens. “Colonial Anxieties, Scientific Missionaries, and Social Containment in Fin-de-Siècle Beirut.” Archaeology and History in the Lebanon 22: 51-61. Khazrik, Jessika. 2017. “I Am Not Your History.” The Funambulist 14 “Toxic Atmospheres” (Nov-Dec): 54-57. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1: 11-40. Nixon, Robert. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard University Press.